Animatronic Robot Head

I’ve improved the old robot head project which can be found at the old articles link.. The head will be powered by servomotors and will be built from sheet plastic, metal or plywood. The template which can be used for cutting sheet material can be found at the end of this article. Download the template, compare the size of the printed servomotor with your servomotors at hand. Do the necessary resizing operations by photocopying the print, or you may directly print at the desired dimension. Copy the print onto the sheet material, you may use a simple carbon paper and do the copying by redrawing the lines by hand. The hand will apply some pressure on to the carbon paper and enable it to leave marks on the sheet material. The marks will be the outlines of the template. Cut the marks with a thin plywood saw untill you complete all parts of the head. Sand them a bit to have nicer looking and well fitting parts.

After cutting, assemble all pieces according to the renderings in this article. The head at this article is designed to be powered by 7 servos. So the eyes move independently looking to sides, up and down. The head can turn (look) right-left, up and down. The jaw can also move to do movements like speaking or laughing.

The opposite is of course possible. The number of servos can be reduced. to fore example 4 servos. With less servos, the cost of the head will be much lover though the most expensive parts are the servos. The moving parts can be selected as you wish; either the head itself, eyes, or the jaw can move. The independent moving eyes can be connected to the same servo so turn to the same side.

a circuit schematic of an application with 4 servos An assembly source code of an applicetion with 4 servos.

The jaw mechanism can also trigger a sound recording-playing circuit (can also be found among our site articles) so that the robot head can also talk.

This is the schematic of the sound recording and playing circuit.

If you don’t want to be bothered with microcontrollers, asm coding etc, you can directly use our ozz chips.

With oz ser 1 chip, you can use 6 onboard push-buttons to program 4 servos independently up to 32 steps of movement. The chip will drive the servos when the power is on and do a continuously repeat the given program. The program needn’t be 32 steps long. it can be less if desired. The program’s end can be changed via the onboard push buttons by the user. All the steps of the program can be altered whenever needed as well.